Data for journalists and researchers
NYC Daycare Check maintains a continuously updated dataset covering every licensed childcare program in New York City — about 2,700 daycare centers, 4,500 state-licensed home programs, and 1,900 free Pre-K/3-K sites — built nightly from official government records. All of it is free to cite with a link.
What's available
- Monthly data briefs — a dated page per month with citywide numbers: program counts, open critical violations, state enforcement actions, water-lead results, and free Pre-K seat demand. Each month's figures freeze when the month closes, so a cited number stays checkable. RSS feed.
- Monthly time series (CSV) — the same metrics as one machine-readable file, one row per month.
- Current statistics — today's citywide and by-borough numbers, updated with every data refresh.
- Per-facility records — every program has a public page with its full inspection history and sources. Neighborhood-level views are in the directory.
For platforms and developers (API)
The same data powers a set of stable, read-only JSON endpoints — no key, no signup, CC BY 4.0. Fetch them directly:
/data/build/index-centers.json— every licensed center (slim records: name, address, coords, band, open-critical count, last-inspection date). Alsoindex-homebased.jsonandindex-prek.json./data/build/facilities/<id>.json— one facility's full record, including its inspection history and, for multi-site operators, its operator grouping./data/build/stats.json— citywide and by-borough aggregates./briefs/nyc-childcare-monthly.csv— the monthly time series.
These are static files served from the site's CDN, refreshed on the same nightly cadence as the pages. Building something on top of this data? Tell us at alerts@nycdaycarecheck.com — we're glad to keep a schema stable for anyone who depends on it.
Where the data comes from
Every figure is computed from official sources: the NYC Health Department's daily active-programs roster and per-center inspection files, New York State's (OCFS) licensing registry and per-provider inspection records, Article 47 water-lead test results, the DOE's MySchools Pre-K/3-K directory, and building-level city records (HPD, DOB, 311). No surveys, no estimates, no self-reported numbers. Refresh cadence and limitations are documented in the methodology, and every page shows the date its data was last refreshed.
Citing us
Data is licensed CC BY 4.0 — free to reuse with attribution. A suggested citation appears on the statistics page and on every monthly brief. For most uses: "NYC Daycare Check, computed from official NYC DOHMH, NYS OCFS, and NYC DOE records. nycdaycarecheck.com"
Requests
Need a cut of the data we compute but don't publish — a specific neighborhood, time window, or metric? Email alerts@nycdaycarecheck.com and we'll usually respond within a day. Corrections go through the corrections process.